NIGMS Director Berg Steps Down

Jeremy Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), announced today that he will step down next June to take a job at the University of Pittsburgh. Berg, a chemist who has headed NIGMS since 2003, said: "I had no intention of leaving NIGMS at this point, but am doing so in support of the career of my wife, Wendie," a breast cancer imaging researcher who has been job-hunting since May and wound up with a position at Pitt. Berg will become the university's associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning in the health sciences.

The $2 billion NIGMS is NIH's basic research institute, funding everything from bioinformatics grants to a large collaborative network studying cell signaling. NIGMS also funds training programs to increase diversity in science.

Besides running his own institute, Berg pitched in on NIH-wide projects. He helped lead efforts to overhaul the NIH peer-review system, devise new awards for young scientists, and shore up basic behavioral research at NIH. He's also known for his openness with the research community. For example, he recently posted data on the NIGMS blog on how peer-review scoring works and a much-discussed analysis suggesting that midsize labs are the most productive.

"This is quite a loss for NIH, generally, and for behavioral science at NIH in particular," says Alan Kraut, executive director of the Association for Psychological Science.